ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610210098
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ABINGDON
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
Even his opponents grudgingly acknowledge the political savvy of Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, who has represented Virginia's 9th Congressional District for the past 14 years.
"He's a good politician, and the thing is, he's a hard-working man," said Patrick Muldoon, his Republican challenger this year.
Except for two re-election bids in which he had no opposition, Boucher's opponents have attacked him for supposedly being out of step with the conservative district. Conservative special-interest groups such as the Conservative Index and American Conservative Union rated him last year as voting for issues they favor only 26 percent and 4 percent of the time, respectively. Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization, rated him as supporting its issues 75 percent of the time in 1995. The National Taxpayers Union has listed him in the top 10 percent of big spenders in Congress.
So far, none of that has seemed to matter. Boucher's high visibility in his district, his helpfulness to constituents with federal problems, and concepts such as a fiber-optic educational network, funding for industrial parks in every county and the Commission on the Future of Southwest Virginia appear to overcome all that.
Boucher organized the commission to give the region a unified lobbying voice and tackle topics from transportation and tourism to technology. He uses his office to encourage "electronic villages" throughout the district, bringing representatives of the Blacksburg Electronic Village to other district localities for how-to sessions on how to hook up their communities to the Internet.
He used his clout with telephone companies to get more high-speed lines in the district, to lure high-tech business and industry there. He has brought representatives of outside industries to look at Southwest Virginia, and some have ended up establishing operations in the region.
"I don't consider myself philosophical at all. I consider myself practical," Boucher, 50, has said as far back as 1982, when he won his first House term. "The best way to run for re-election is to do well the job you're elected to do," he has also repeated often.
Boucher has some visibility on the national legislative horizon, having co-written legislation for telecommunications regulatory changes which pave the way for telephone companies to compete with cable television firms in providing cable or satellite TV access to customers. That may be why telephone utilities contributed more than $52,000 to his campaign fund from 1993 to 1994, although he also got $4,000 from the cable TV industry.
During that same period, his campaign fund also benefited from $15,000 in contributions from the tobacco industry, $10,500 from defense (mainly in the electronics and aerospace categories), $65,000 from energy and natural resources, $81,558 from finance, insurance and real estate groups, $49,300 from health industries, $56,750 from labor unions, and $25,000 from the transportation industry.
It should come as no surprise that those contributions echo how special interest groups in those areas rate Boucher in supporting their issues. He was rated high in 1995 by labor unions, 100 percent by three of them. Also rating him as supporting their issues 100 percent of the time were such diverse groups as the National Rifle Association, National Association of Retired Federal Employees, American Association of University Women and American Postal Workers Union.
Some of Boucher's critics say he is too visible, showing up to announce projects with which he has had nothing to do. For example, Boucher was featured prominently among the speakers last month when Morton Powder Co. in Wytheville announced a major expansion.
But Boucher took no credit for that in his remarks, merely offering congratulations and any future assistance his office could provide. Even Tom Roberts, the Virginia Independent/Reform Party candidate who is Boucher's other challenger this year, said he sees nothing wrong with that sort of thing. Boucher simply lends the prestige of his office to the occasion, Roberts said. And it usually gets Boucher into the news because he always researches the background for what is happening and provides pertinent quotes about it.
More often, Boucher is directly involved in what is being announced, mostly in getting federal funds for such recently announced projects as a small business incubator in the New River Valley, a regional farmer's market in Scott County, a water project serving Buchanan and Dickenson counties, a federal prison in Lee County, and the Coalfields Expressway highway project in far Southwest Virginia.
Projects like these, along with Boucher's continuing opposition to abolishing federal funding agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission and Economic Development Administration, draw fire from those trying to classify him as a tax-and-spend Democrat. Boucher's pre-emptive defense of such projects is practically the same every time - that it is a wise use of federal funds because it will create jobs or otherwise increase tax revenues well beyond what is being invested.
He put it this way in his acceptance speech at the district Democratic convention in May, where he was chosen to run for an eighth term: "The momentum we are establishing is due to the fact that we are aggressively defending the role of the federal government in support of the American public's core values."
He talks much that way in all his speeches, in a formal and almost-professorial manner that seems to come naturally to him and which generates paragraphs that he can repeat almost verbatim, and without notes, when called on for back-to-back TV interviews.
Boucher becomes frustrated, though, with brief sound-bite journalism, arguing that it takes a certain amount of wordage to explain complicated subjects and put them in context. In making an announcement of some project or initiative involving his office, he will usually start with the background and work his way up to what is being done on that particular day. He will answer most questions the same way, as to a request for an example of his working with others to secure legislative benefits:
"Cable television companies today enjoy an exemption from copyright liability when they retransmit local television broadcasts over their cable systems. One of my current goals is to extend that same copyright exemption to telephone companies when they retransmit local broadcast signals over the cable systems they will soon build. My effort was strongly opposed by a senior officer of Telecommunications Inc. (TCI), the nation's largest owner of cable systems. In the effort to eliminate his very considerable opposition to my proposal and to gain his support for my effort, I contacted him and made the argument, which he found persuasive, that his company would also benefit from my proposal since TCI is now planning to subcontract with some telephone companies to be their provider of cable television service over telephone company facilities. He was persuaded that the advantages to his company outweighed the competitive disadvantages which motivated his initial position."
Republican William Wampler, who was unseated by Boucher by a narrow margin in 1982 after having held the 9th District congressional seat since 1967, used to have periodic "open door meetings" throughout the district which proved helpful in staying in touch with his constituents. Boucher took that concept, changed the terminology to "town meetings" and now attends some 100 of them each year on weekends when he can get away from Washington.
He also keeps himself before constituents with a weekly newspaper column that runs in many of the county newspapers throughout the district, and large mailings of newsletters and notices of town meetings to households throughout the 9th. The National Taxpayers Union has criticized his use of the congressional free-postage privilege for mailings within a legislator's district, listing him as the second-highest spender in that category.
The town meetings also give Boucher an opportunity to make a positive report on his initiatives in customary opening remarks. He brings along staff members to provide on-the-spot assistance to people having problems with Social Security, Medicare, black lung benefits or any other federal program, all of which often has the side effect of winning him new supporters.
Muldoon has criticized Boucher's vote for the Brady Bill which requires a waiting period to buy handguns. The Gun Owners of America, a national lobbying organization, has endorsed Muldoon. The NRA has given Muldoon its highest rating - but it did the same for Boucher.
Boucher tends to specialize in fields like telecommunications that, he argues, have much potential for benefiting his mostly rural district. For example, he is gradually getting federal funding for a fiber-optic network to link school and colleges. This would allow one teacher to teach classes in several localities in subjects which a single locality might not be able to afford to teach and, Boucher argues, is one way to help get around the funding disparities to rural school districts.
He thinks that members of Congress make a mistake by trying to know a little bit about everything and, instead, immerses himself in those areas that he sees as benefiting his district.
His staff members specialize, too, and work long hours but no longer than those he works himself. A bachelor who does not spend a lot of time in the Washington social scene, Boucher has said he is doing just what he wants to be doing.
Boucher grew up in Abingdon, graduated from Roanoke College and the University of Virginia law school. A lawyer by profession and a partner with his mother in an Abingdon law firm from 1971 to 1982, Boucher now says he is better able to help people by being in Congress than in a courtroom.
If the odds are on his side this year, it was not always so. He was the underdog in the challenge to longtime incumbent Wampler. Earlier, at age 28, he seemed the underdog in what proved a successful bid to wrest his party's Virginia Senate candidacy from another incumbent. He served in the state Senate from 1974 until his congressional win in 1982.
Those may be among the reasons why his opponents try never to underestimate him.
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